One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.

Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.

Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen.

I like to do things that are surprising and different.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

If all else fails, there's always print or web zines.

In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.

It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.